Economic Insight: number-crunchers called to account

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Statistics matter, perhaps more than ever now. We live in the time of big
data, a time when numbers are slowly replacing judgment to justify big
decisions, a time when increasingly stats are being mistaken for facts.

All the more important, then, that the official UK figures are accurate. I
raise the point because Britain is about to get a new national statistician,
just as questions are being asked about the quality of the official data.

Jil Matheson’s successor as chief executive of the UK Statistics Authority is
likely to be named within the next week. Whoever lands the post